William Blake once celebrated our ability “To see the
world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower.” In the more
than two centuries since then, other writers have illuminated history
by viewing it through the lens of disease, agricultural innovations,
or war (as Jared Diamond did several years ago in his best-selling Guns,
Germs, and Steel). If a writer links the part to the whole by supplying
compelling evidence, the reader comes away with a fresh look into the
human past.

At first Oak: The Frame of Civilization seems a bit of an
overreach. Could those be the trees our ancestors dropped out of, or
from which they plucked the forbidden fruit? Well, no. But William
Bryant Logan, a professional arborist and a skilled writer, has the
wit to make a pun of his subtitle and go on to provide an oaken proscenium
arch for the beginnings of Western civilization.

“What is so special about oaks?” Logan asks, and lets a paleobotanist
supply the answer: “Nothing.” And that's just the point. Oaks boast
no titles in the arboreal world. They aren't the oldest trees or the
tallest; they don't supply the strongest wood, the sweetest fruit,
or the prettiest flowers. But like the tortoise beating the hare to
the finish line, the adaptable, tenacious oaks grow almost everywhere
in temperate regions, assume both deciduous and evergreen forms, and
diversify into as many as 450 species. Tracing the distribution of
oaks on a world map, Logan finds them “coterminous with the locations
of the settled civilizations of Asia, Europe, and North America.”

As early man emerged from the antediluvian shadows, oaks of one kind
or another were at hand to supply the very needs that confirmed his
humanity. The trees were widespread and abundant, their wood durable
yet tractable. “Even a polished stone ax could take down a moderate-sized
oak, and seasoned oak wedges then split it,” Logan writes. “As long
as the oak logs were fresh cut . . . they were easily split into lengths
along the lines of the prominent annual rings and along the radial
rays to make plank-paved boardwalks and sturdy boats. Oak logs could
be squared and framed, and joints cut in the strong wood held buildings
together.”

Charcoal made from oak was primarily the wood that ended the Stone
Age. Logan's case for its key role in human history is bolstered by
the discovery during the 1970s that oaks can tell time even more accurately
than radiocarbon dating. The annual growth rings in the wood pinpoint
events exactly, going back 10 millennia, and even reveal the season
of the year in which the wood was cut.

Reading Logan about many aspects of oaks, such as their fruit, is
to expand one's vocabulary: balanophage means “acorn eaters.” If mighty
trees from little acorns grow, the implication is that much nourishment
lies in those fruits produced by oaks, and primitive people in many
parts of the world made them staples in their diet. They proved to
be tasteless to most later humans, however, who figured out that pork
beats acorns any day, and began feeding them to their pigs. Roaming
the woodlands in search of acorns, pigs deposited the droppings that
in turn helped to produce healthy oak forests.

From various parts of the trees, advancing civilizations were able
to take their most valuable raw materials. They cut the wood to build
homes and churches, and to fashion boats that triggered commerce and
exploration. They buried their dead first in hollowed-out oak logs,
and later in elaborate oaken coffins. Oak barrels held their wine and
other perishables, while cork oaks provided just the thing for stoppering
their bottles. Oak galls became a prime source of both the dyes that
brightened their cloth and the ink that preserved their accounts and
sagas. Converting oak to the best charcoal fired their forges to produce
swords, cannons, hinges for their doors and windows, and crowns for
their kings.

Logan doesn't push his thesis too far. For him the year 1862 marks
the end of the Age of Oaks. The “ironclads” arrived during the Civil
War to establish their dominance over the magnificent oaken sailing
ships that had fired the human imagination. Coal and oil, along with
the myriad products based on them, then carried us into the industrial
era.

Yet as Logan remarks, the substance of these triumphant new materials
is “just old stem and branch and leaf and root.” Looking at an oak
today, we see not a world or a heaven but a unique living thing, out
of a time even deeper than the ingenuity that first put it to civilization's
uses.

EDITORS' CHOICE

To
See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifelong ObsessionBy Dan KoeppelHudson Street Press,
304 pages, $24.95

Everyone has his or her addiction, be it coffee, alcohol, or nicotine.
Birdwatching is the drug of choice for Richard Koeppel, father of author
Dan Koeppel, who writes affectionately but honestly about his father's
unhealthy obsession with counting birds. The elder Koeppel's addiction
was born when he saw a brown thrasher as a 12-year-old boy in Queens,
New York. Later, as an adult, his life begins a slow downward spiral,
as he chooses birds over his career as a doctor, his marriage, and
his relationships with his family and friends. After his parents' divorce,
Koeppel writes, “I knew, then, that Dad would never allow himself to
fall in love again, at least not with a human.” In spending more than
$300,000 to support his habit of traveling the world in search of every
bird on earth, Richard Koeppel comes ever closer to his life's goal
(he eventually sees 7,200 species). But then, when he is afflicted
with throat cancer, it also becomes a race against time for him to
quit his pursuit before it's too late.

As a child, Alanna Mitchell recalls that her father, George Mitchell,
one of North America's earliest and most esteemed field biologists, “fed
us ecology at the dinner table.” This deep environmental immersion
has served Mitchell well in her career as an award-winning earth sciences
reporter for a Canadian newspaper and in the writing of the heartfelt Dancing
at the Dead Sea. This book is as much a personal journey as it
is a scientific and journalistic investigation of some of the world's
most endangered places. It grew out of a newspaper assignment in Madagascar,
an island nation off southern Africa that Mitchell describes as an “evolutionary
incubator” for birds, plants, bugs, and snakes “found nowhere else
on the planet.” But the island's forests are rapidly being destroyed,
wiping out habitat for lemurs and other unique species. Soon, Mitchell
hopscotches to other imperiled “hot spots” of biodiversity, including
the Arctic (threatened by global warming) and the parched oases of
Jordan (where the Dead Sea is disappearing because of water diversion).
Darwin's evolutionary (and revolutionary) findings on the Galàpagos
(which Mitchell visits as well) guide her appreciation of earth's diversity;
they also inform her understanding of “the modern ecological crisis.” (Mitchell,
in the book's least engaging parts, blames overpopulation and overconsumption
in a preachy, finger-waving manner—at one point calling humans “so
numerous, so ravenous” and “so self-centered a species.”) “Evolution
makes up the unfailing cycle of life,” she writes. But the “staggering
rates of species threatened with extinction—30 percent of fishes, 25
percent of reptiles, 24 percent of mammals, 20 percent of amphibians,
and 12 percent of all bird species,” she says, add up to a kind of
forced evolution, an “artificial selection of species on a wide scale,
the opposite of the natural selection Darwin described. It is the planet
telling us that we have gone too far.” Dancing at the Dead Sea is
a lively, impassioned ecological travelogue, shot through with heavy
doses of conservation polemics. If you can abide the occasional lecture,
it's worth the ride.

In her previous book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Janisse
Ray wrote about her desire to save the South's longleaf pine ecosystem.
Her latest work, Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land, delves
into a similar theme via the immense Pinhook Swamp, located on the
border of Georgia and Florida. Employing a variety of narrative techniques,
from journalistic reporting to essay writing and poetry, Ray explores
the wonders of unadulterated wilderness. “It's like a whale so ancient
and so colossal and so fulfilled by its own life that it cares nothing
of yours,” she writes of the 170,000-acre swamp, which is part of an
ecologically important wildlife corridor larger than Rhode Island.
With loving and engaging accounts of the area's animals, landscapes,
and people, Ray argues for the preservation of large tracts of wilderness
and against the fragmentation of habitat.

—Jesse Greenspan

Art of the Wild

Camille Solyagua's aptly named Twenty-One Red-Crowned Cranes and
One Black Crow (Nazaraeli Press, 16 pages, $40) is an ode to
one of the world's rarest and most majestic birds. Each black-and-white
image shows the cranes—only 2,000 exist in various pockets of East
Asia—in wintry bliss as they forage, squawk, and fly. Solyagua has
been making winter visits to Japan's Hokkaido Island since 2002 to
capture them on film. “From the first time I saw a red-crowned crane,
I was just completely taken with it,” she says. The book is the 27th
in a series of One Picture Books, all of which are 16 pages long
and sold with an original print.